Cerith Wyn Evans

Neon Forms…descending a staircase

2017

White Neon

Cerith Wyn Evan’s artistic practice focuses on how ideas can be communicated through form. His conceptual work incorporates a diverse range of media including installation, sculpture, photography, film and text.

Wyn Evans began his career as a filmmaker producing short, experimental films and collaborative works but since the 1990s has created artworks that focus on language and perception, with a precise clarity towards their manifestation in space. He employs strategies of exhibition making that are often site-specific, viewing exhibitions as a catalyst to produce a reservoir of possible meanings and discursive experiences.

Neon Forms…descending a staircase consists of a complex composition of white neon, suspended from the ceiling by cables, which arcs, extends, folds and disappears into space through a combination of delicate single lines and dense, chaotic clusters. With multiple layers and points of entry, it resists closed form, creating a suspended ‘figure’ that appears from some angles as if drawn from a single broken line, while from others, as if extruding and collaging space itself and making the viewer’s experience of it elastic. Occupying the space above a redundant staircase, from its initial suspension in the ceiling to, at its lowest point, almost touching the bannister and stairs, its meeting of forms and intersecting curves suggests a nucleus of energy barely contained.